THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

The reformist argument has a two key components. The first and the most important is to go back to the most fundamental source of Islam, the Qur'an. Much of what later became established as Islamic law is absent from the Qur'an, and that is true for earthly punishments for blasphemy (or apostasy) as well. The Qur'an, on the contrary,  has verses that command peaceful responses to blasphemy such as refusing to "sit together" with those who "ridicule [God's] revelations" (as, again, I have explained elsewhere).

The second component of reform is to revisit the Sunna--the tradition of the Prophet Muhammad that is written down in "hadith" collections, or sayings, that were canonized almost two centuries after the Prophet's death in 632 AD. These hadith collections, on which much of the Sharia is based, do include stories of the Prophet Muhammad's ordering the execution of some blasphemers during the formative years of Islam. In particular, the story of Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf, a Jewish poet in Medina, whose execution by Muslims is narrated in the most authoritative hadith collection, has been taken by jurists as a precedent to execute blasphemers.

The reformist argument here is to reason that Ka'b ibn al-Ashraf was not killed for insulting the Prophet or Islam, but rather for "inciting people to go to war [against Muslims]," as Ismail Royer notes in an important article that criticizes Pakistan's blasphemy laws from an Islamic perspective. Royer refers to traditional Hanafi scholars who had a more liberal take on the matter, including the 15th century jurist Badr al-Din al-Ayni, who insisted that Ka'b and a few other like him "were not killed merely for their insults [of the Prophet], but rather it was surely because they aided [the enemy] against him, and joined with those who fought wars against him."

There is another kind of reformist argument as well, which is called "historicism." It suggests that whatever one may find in the Qur'an or the prophetic tradition in terms of jurisprudence constitutes a body of historical  facts that are bounded by their context, and are not necessarily normative for all Muslims at all times. The fact that the Qur'an legislates slavery, for example, doesn't mean that slavery is a justified institution. One of the pioneers of this "historicist" reading of the Qur'an and the broader Islamic tradition was the Pakistani-born scholar Fazlur Rahman Malik (1919-1988), who spent his later life in the United States, teaching at the University of Chicago. Today there are "Fazlur Rahmanist" theologians in Turkey, Indonesia, and elsewhere who are trying to advance his approach.

Such reformist arguments can be heard all over the Muslim world--along with the conservative reactions to them. Comparatively speaking, the Muslim world, on average, is at the very same period when John Locke wrote A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) or John Stuart Mill wrote On Liberty (1859). There are liberals pushing for change, in other words, against conservatives who think the heretics and the infidels must be punished and all subversive ideas must be banned.

There is no straight path along which this reform may proceed, given that Islam, unlike Catholicism, has no central authority that can change the religious doctrine of its 1.5 billion followers. In this sense it is more like Protestantism, where authority is diffused into countless numbers of national institutions, traditional centers of learning, charismatic leaders, televangelists, modern theologians, moderates, radicals, and many perplexed individuals.

Progress--towards liberalism--may take place only as more and more Muslims find reformist arguments convincing. And that can take place only as more and more Muslims feel themselves at home in the modern world, rather than being "otherized" by that world--let alone being threatened, invaded, or bombed by it.

On blasphemy, in particular, Muslims will come to accept liberal norms when they understand that they are not helping their religion by meeting criticism, or even mockery, with violence and fury. They are only proving to be immature, and are only provoking more insults against the faith.

This may be hard to understand for the militant Islamists in the slums of Pakistan, but Muslims living in the West seem to be finally getting how things work here. This was evident in the remarkably mild stance that Dutch Muslims took when Wilders tried to organize his "Muhammad Cartoon Contest" in Holland. Anger waxed in Pakistan, but not in the streets of Dutch cities or towns, as the Guardian reported. "It's easy to spread hate," said one Dutch Muslim, Usman Firdausi, "but the best response is dignity."

Dignity, indeed, is the right response to the Muhammad cartoons or The Satanic Verses. And 30 years after the Ayatollah's death fatwa, not all Muslims but at least some Muslims seem to be getting this right.

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